The principal memorial to the carnage stands in the middle of the battlefield a short distance along the D913 beyond Fleury. It is the Ossuaire de Douaumont (daily: March & Oct 9am–noon & 2–5.30pm; April 9am–6pm; May–Aug 9am–6.30pm; Sept 9am–noon & 2–6pm; Nov 9am–noon & 2–5pm; €3), a vast and surreal structure with the stark simplicity of a Romanesque crypt or a Carolingian sarcophagus, from which rises a central tower shaped like a projectile aimed at the heavens. Its vaults contain the bones of thousands upon thousands of unidentified soldiers, French and German, some of them visible through windows set in the base of the building. When the battle ended in 1918, the ground was covered in fragments of corpses; 120,000 French bodies were identified, perhaps a third of the total killed.Across the road, a cemetery contains the graves of 15,000 men who died more or less whole – Christians commemorated by rows of identical crosses, Muslims of the French colonial regiments by gravestones aligned in the direction of Mecca. Nearby, a wall commemorates the Jewish dead, beneath a treeless ridge-top on whose tortured, pitted ground around the remains of the Fort de Thiaumont some of them must have died. The Fort de Douaumont (daily: Feb, March & Oct–Dec 10am–1pm & 2–5pm; April–June & Sept 10am–6pm; July & Aug 10am–7pm; closed Jan; €3) is 900m down the road from the cemetery. Completed in 1912 and commanding the highest point of land, it was the strongest of the 38 forts built to defend Verdun. But, in one of those inexplicable aberrations of military top brass, the armament of these forts was greatly reduced in 1915 – when the Germans attacked in 1916, twenty men were enough to overrun the garrison of 57 French territorials. The fort is on three levels, two of them underground, and its claustrophobic, dungeon-like galleries are hung with stalactites. The Germans, who held it for eight months, had 3000 men housed in its cramped quarters with no toilets, continuously under siege, its ventilation ducts blocked for protection against gas, infested with fleas and lice and plagued by rats that attacked the sleeping and the dead indiscriminately. In one night, when their ammunition exploded, 1300 men died in the blast. When the French retook the fort, it was with Moroccan troops in the vanguard. General Mangin, revered by officialdom as the heroic victor of the battle, was known to his troops as "the butcher" for his practice of shoving colonial troops into the front line as cannon fodder. Furthest from Verdun, well signposted from the D913, is the so-called Tranchée des Baïonnettes (Trench of the Bayonets), where, according to legend, two entire infantry platoons are thought to have been buried alive in an upright position with fixed bayonets during a German bombardment on June 11, 1916. A concrete memorial has been built around the area. Though not particularly interesting to look at, it still makes for a very moving experience. Sadly, the bayonets have been stolen.
Pages in section ‘Douaumont’: St-Mihiel.
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